DIDICOI

HC Deb 15 May 1964 vol 695 cc779-98

11.15 a.m.

Mr. Gilbert Longden (Hertfordshire, South-West)

I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for having given me the opportunity of raising the question of didicoi this morning. It is very pleasant to be able to come to the House with the knowledge that one will be heard. So often one sits pregnant on the back benches throughout the day only to find that one has laboured in vain. I do not normally speak for more than 15 minutes, but this morning I shall have to exceed that a little. Before I begin, I should like to take the opportunity of thanking my right hon. Friend the Minister for having come to the House himself to answer the debate.

The problem which I wish to raise this morning has two aspects. The first is the human aspect—how can we help didicoi to lead a normal life for the benefit of themselves and, above all, their children, and the second aspect is the social one—how much longer are we to tolerate the hideous and insanitary mess which they make of our rural countryside? The second aspect affects far more people than the first, but although I do not want to exaggerate it—there are many other people who dis- figure our countryside, as the Keep Britain Tidy Group well knows—it is not a trivial matter which gives offence only to the unreasonably fastidious.

First, then, what are didicoi? I am indebted to the hon. Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart), whose theory it is that the word comes from the Greek, which means followers or successors—originally of the troops of Alexander the Great. This is an ingenious theory, because the word "gypsy" itself comes from Greece, which was then called "Little Egypt." I am grateful to the hon. Member for telling me. It means, incidentally, that there is no "s" at the end of the word. The point is that these people are not gypsies: they are not true Romanies. They are more the "flaming tin-men" of Thomas Hardy, otherwise itinerant caravan-dwelling tinkers. A Dublin report of last November said that there were no fewer than 100,000 Irish itinerants in this country today, and one asks why.

There is nothing wrong in living in a caravan. This is a free country, but liberty has here degenerated into licence. The fact of the matter is that these people do not give one of their own proverbial cusses for what they do in and around the places where their caravans have rested. They trade in junk and scrap metal and find it much cheaper to ply their trade on grass verges, paying neither rent nor rates and leaving local authorities to clear up the mess, if and when the arm of the law drives them round the bend—which is about as far as it ever does drive them. That is why I have described them as a menace.

Whereas otherwise they would have met with the good-natured tolerance of most country folk, they have forfeited their right to that by showing an utter disregard for other people's enjoyment of the countryside and a carelessness for their neighbour's health, convenience and property which goes well beyond the bounds of the tolerable. They have no latrine discipline; they pester neighbouring householders for water and anything else which they may be able to scrounge; they pull down trees and fences for firewood; and they dump such scrap as is unsaleable by the roadside or on private property.

Local authorities in Hertfordshire and elswhere, from the country council downwards, have been bombarded with complaints not only from local sufferers, but also from passing motorists, who resent the transformation of our green and pleasant land into a rusty and very unpleasant refuse dump. A letter in The Times not long ago spoke of grass growing high round old cars on the Watford by-pass. The writer said that Thousands of miles of motoring on the Continent has shown nothing remotely approaching this horrible sight of miscellaneous rubbish wantonly dumped. They also afflict many other parts of the country outside my constituency. They are in Kent—there was a photograph in the Daily Telegraph two days ago—they are in Lincolnshire, and at this very moment a public meeting is going on in a British Legion hall at Corfe Mullen where the Poole Borough Council and the Wimborne R.D.C. and goodness knows how many private citizens are protesting against the decision of the Dorset County Council, not that there should be a site for the didicoi down there, but that the site should be placed where the county council suggests.

My hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew), who is in his place this morning, raised the matter in the House on the Adjournment of 20th February last, and my noble Friend, Lord Hawke, raised it in another place on 23rd January last. I can only say that I respectfully hope that I shall get a more satisfactory reply than my hon. Friend received on 20th February. I must tell my right hon. Friend that it is really not so much a question of "awakening the social conscience" to the plight of these people, but rather of awakening their conscience to their duty to their neighbour.

It is now well over a year ago since I first became involved in this matter, and I have large files of correspondence with no fewer than three Departments of State, goodness knows how many private citizens, and four local authorities. I turned, first, to the police. I discovered that they have no power to use force to move people off property; that one has no redress if other people dump rubbish on one's land, and that didicoi simply move to and fro across county boundaries as and when the pressure is put upon them.

Nevertheless, in 1962, no fewer than 593 prosecutions were brought by the Hertfordshire Police and 287 by the Metropolitan Police, either for causing litter—maximum penalty £10; or for camping on the highway—maximum penalty £2; or for lighting fires close to the highway—maximum penalty £2. The police have certainly done their stuff, but these ridiculous fines make little impact upon the thick wads of Treasury notes generally carried under the skirt—and even they are not always recoverable.

I should have thought that the fact that the nuisance continues to increase despite this large number of prosecutions was proof enough that the law needs strengthening. My constituents feel that the authorities do not make enough use of the existing law, and that is, perhaps, because, on human grounds, they are loath to take action if there is nowhere for the evicted to go.

I turned then to the county council to see what it was doing. It informed me that the Ministry's solution, conveyed in Circular No. 6/1962, was that sites must somehow, somewhere, be found where these didicoi could bring their caravans to permanent rest, with a proper water supply, hard standing and sanitation; and whence their children could be properly educated, and discouraged from following the same way of life themselves.

If this solution is the right one, it is inescapable that local authorities must collaborate by providing sites; but the Hertfordshire County Council found that it was one thing to be told to "find sites", and quite another to persuade any district council to receive these people within their districts. Violent opposition from the neighbours not unnaturally met any proposal for any given site.

But, quite apart from this difficulty, I have myself never thought that this expedient would solve the problem. Last November I wrote to my right hon. Friend explaining why, and suggesting that his Department should give it fresh thought in conjunction with the Home Office and the Ministry of Transport; and that such joint consultation should be followed by concerted and energetic action. I sent copies of my letter to the other two Ministries and to all the local authorities concerned. Incidentally, that is part of the trouble—so many Departments are involved, as well as so many local authorities.

Meanwhile, my own contribution was to suggest, first, that dealers in scrap metal should be licensed; secondly, that regional co-operative efforts should be made to dispose efficiently and economically of old motor cars and other bulky junk; thirdly, that the maximum penalties for these misdemeanours should be increased; and, fourthly, that a better way of coping with this difficult problem would be to settle each family, or family group, separately in separate villages. I should like to record the present state of play on each of these suggestions.

On the first point, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary replied that Section 86 of the Public Health Acts Amendment Act, 1907, provided for the registration of dealers in scrap metal but only in those areas where local authorities had adopted the provisions of the Act. He told me that in my constituency, out of four district councils, only one—the Rickmansworth Urban District Council—had adopted the provisions.

It is some years now since an official working party recommended that registration should be mandatory and universal instead of just permissive, but successive Tory Ministers have, as I believe rightly, hesitated to tamper with the decision of the representatives of the local electors on the spot and have left it to the town hall rather than Whitehall—a good Tory principle.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-West (Sir D. Kaberry) has now introduced his Scrap Metal Dealers Bill, which the Government fully support, and which will so provide. The admitted object of registration is …to help the police in the prevention and detection of thefts of metal… not to preserve amenities; and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary does not …think it would be reasonable to impose a licensing system on the whole of the scrap metal trade because of the activities of a certian type of dealer. He adds: The working party considered and rejected suggestions that the registration authority should have power to refuse or cancel registration of persons considered unsuitable—which is what a licensing system would involve. I am not sure that I agree, but at least something will have been achieved when all dealers in scrap metal must register.

On my second point—about the disposal of old cars and the like, I was informed by my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary that discussions were to take place between his Department, the Ministry of Transport and the local authority associations on the disposal of unwanted motor cars. On 3rd March, in answer to a Question in which I had pointed out that on the Continent it is common practice for machines to dispose of large old cars at the rate of 15 an hour, reducing them to an amount that can be wheeled away in a barrow, my hon. Friend told me that as a result of a meeting with representatives of these bodies his right hon. Friend …hopes…to be able to give local authorities some useful advice."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 3rd March, 1964; Vol. 690, c. 1101.] I would be grateful if he is now able to tell us what advice has been given.

My hon. Friend also told me that the Minister had set up a working party on refuse collection generally, under the chairmanship of Mr. H. H. Browne, of his Department, and comprising, among others, a housing manager, a borough treasurer, a works study specialist, a housewife and an engineer—and, also, I was glad to see, the Secretary of the Keep Britain Tidy Group.

When I asked whether the setting up of this working party had been necessary because there is much more refuse than there was or because its character has changed, my hon. Friend replied that it was …for both those reasons; and also because of the development of alternative means of dealing with refuse. That sounded to me much more hopeful, and since then I am glad to have been informed by my hon. Friend that some of the local authorities in West Hertfordshire are discussing the possibility of …making joint arrangements for the disposal of old cars…but that whether it is worth acquiring a very large baling machine must depend on the number of cars for disposal in any particular area. May I again suggest to him that there will be an ever increasing number of obsolete cars in every area, and that it is high time that the appropriate authorities did take thought for their disposal.

Thirdly, as to the penalties, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary told me on 23rd January that the Minister of Transport and he would consider an increase of the penalties for depositing rubbish and camping on the highway …when an opportunity for legislation occurs."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 3rd January, 1964; Vol. 687, c. 1252.] So it is at this point that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport enters the picture. He was good enough to write to me on 30th January last, and his letter describes the utter inadequacy of the Highways Acts in the face of this problem.

The Act of 1959, he tells me, contains various penal provisions about the unauthorised placing of things in highways". An offence is committed if the highway, or any user of it, is damaged by the "thing", or if "rubbish is deposited" upon it. But, he adds: the deposit of scrap metal is not necessarily an offence in itself. Moreover, even if it were an offence, the maximum penalty is only £2, and I am glad to say that my right hon. Friend considers that, by present-day standards, that is an inadequate deterrent. The difficulty of enforcing even these inadequate penalties would admittedly be much reduced if the plan to make the offenders more or less permanently resident in an area succeeds.

In his letter my right hon. Friend goes on to describe two other Sections of the Act which it is clear are quite useless for our purposes. And if anybody should think of asking whether or not verges are part of the highway, my advice to him would be, "Don't", because it could not matter less. My right hon. Friend informs me that to take legal proceedings for trespass upon verges is "a very slow business", and by way of illustration he mentions a dealer in scrap and miscellaneous junk whose determined delaying tactics staved off a decision by the court for three years.

So much for the Highways Acts and their penalties. As for the Litter Act, on 24th March my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary informed my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Mr. David James) that he had no reason to think that the maximum fine for offences under that Act was inadequate, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary appears to agree with that view. I do not, and I have a further Question down on this matter for Answer on 2nd June.

I turn, lastly, to my fourth point: how best to resettle. This is the human picture, and with this we return to the sphere of responsibility of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government. In pursuance of the Ministry's policy, the Bushey Urban District Council has offered a site, which it considers to be one which will least damage the amenities of the neighbourhood, for a maximum of 16 caravans for a maximum period of 10 years. Everyone in the neighbourhood objects to this proposal, and I have forwarded to my right hon. Friend a petition against it.

As there is to be a local inquiry on 20th May and the matter is, therefore, sub judice, I will not comment on this particular site—but on the merits of the proposed solution of the problem generally I have long since made my objections clear.

First, who is to choose the 16, and where are the others going? Secondly, how will we prevent other caravanners "muscling in" on Hertfordshire's efforts? In the beginning there were 89 in Hertfordshire, but that number has already risen to 100. In his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans on 20th February, my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary said that as soon as there is rumour of a site, all sorts of people come in who have nothing to do with Kent…or Hertfordshire, as the case may be… He went on: Now we have the situation that Kent, having taken the lead, instead of getting any alleviation of the burden, is tending to attract the didicois…from areas which have not been as consciertious."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20th February, 1964; Vol. 689, cc. 1531–2.] He added that his right hon. Friend had no direct powers in this matter, which was a local authority responsibility and that the Minister could rely only on persuasion.

Thirdly, if they continue to deal in scrap metal, where will they dump what they cannot sell? Fourthly, I have several little pockets of law-abiding, hardworking, caravan-dwellers in my constituency who have been given notice to quit their sites. Why should not they, too, be provided at county expense with pukka sites? They have nowhere else to go.

I think that this is the wrong way of going about it mainly because these didicoi will continue to be isolated members of the community. But if, for the time being, some of these people are to be resited, I hope that it will be beyond dispute that the sites chosen should be as far removed as possible from anywhere where they may cause offence either to local residents or to the landscape. I hope that the occupants will be charged full economic rents; that their children will be effectively controlled; and that if they deal in scrap they will be at least registered, if not licensed. I hope that there will be no dumping or litter of any kind, and that no more will be allowed into the county.

But surely it would be better to parcel them out, by families, among the community, so that their children may be educated without overcrowding any particular school; so that they may ultimately, if they so wish, qualify for council houses, and so that, in short, they may be painlessly assimilated into the community.

To sum up, here are twin problems—how to prevent our countryside from being used as a rubbish dump for unwanted scrap, and how best to deal with the people who are largely guilty of so using it. Cannot all dealers in scrap metal be licensed? Cannot there be closer and more effective co-operation in the disposal of bulky junk? Ought not the maximum penalties to be considerably increased? Would it not be better to resettle the didicoi by families or family groups, and not in larger numbers? Finally, if they are, for the time being, to be given sites, at least let the conditions that I have just stipulated be fulfilled.

11.36 a.m.

Sir John Vaughan-Morgan (Reigate)

Since there may be other hon. Members who wish to speak in later debates I shall not detain the House for more than a few minutes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, South-West (Mr. Longden) on raising this matter and on the immense vigour with which he has pursued his researches for over a year. I also support him in everything that he has said and, in particular, in regard to the remedies for which he has so wisely asked.

I hesitate to use the word, but there is an element rather of indifference on the part of a number of Government Departments involved. I am sure that in theory they are anxious to help, but they seem not to be able to offer any really constructive thoughts. Today, my hon. Friend has done so, and has put forward obvious steps that need to be taken if a solution to the problem is to be found.

This matter affects not only Hertfordshire and Kent, but Surrey—indeed, it arises everywhere in the green belt, and I would imagine that it is to be found in other parts of the country, around the great conurbations. I have great experience of the problem in my constituency, and in my own village in the constituency. There is one admirable local site where caravan dwellers are living, and I hope that they will remain there. The caravans are fulfilling a very good purpose. There is another site, however, which some didicoi acquired about 15 years ago, which has become a scene of increasing and appalling squalor.

The county and the rural district councils have taken a very long time to take such action as is open to them. It is now under way, however. The authorities are in the throes of obtaining control of this site, and they will be able to impose controls on the inhabitants. I hope that it will then become less of a menace to health, and not such a scene of squalor as it is now.

In addition to that, since I live in a village which is surrounded by common land I have the problem of itinerant didicois. Let me give one example. Within 100 yards of my village church—which is on a common—on what is National Trust land intended for the benefit of the public, just off the verge there is a caravan which settled there about eight weeks ago. As owners of the land, the National Trust has asked the police to move the caravan on. The police are faced with the fact that the woman in the caravan is pregnant, and has a doctor's certificate to say that under no circumstances must she be moved on. Quite frankly, this is irrelevant to the problem. I can understand why the police are rather hesitant to face failure in the courts, but this is typical of the way in which the efforts of the police and local authorities are baffled.

If the didicoi can be settled on a site there is every hope of progress. I revert to the site in my constituency, which has been there for many years. The children go to the village school and, as a result of great diligence and enthusiasm on the part of the local headmistress, Miss White, there have been some remarkable successes. Some of the children have gone on to secondary modern schools and have been very successful there. They then elect to choose another way of life.

It is clear that success in this matter can be achieved if only the methods which we adopt are made slightly more severe. If that were done we could solve the problem. I support my hon. Friend in everything that he has said, and I thank him, on behalf of all fellow sufferers, for what he has done in drawing attention to the matter.

11.40 a.m.

The Minister of Housing and Local Government and Minister for Welsh Affairs (Sir Keith Joseph)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend—my formidable friend—the Member for Hertfordshire, South-West (Mr. Longden) for going so deeply into this difficult, almost intractable, subject. I am grateful, also, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan) for adding his comments.

The didicoi, as my hon. Friend said, are not the true Romany. They are people who have for one reason or another, good or bad, chosen to lead an itinerant form of life. They are generally attracted to the perimeter of prospering conurbations where they can earn money by carrying out a number of trades such as we connect with tinkers or car breakers; and they do a number of constructional jobs as well, making up gravel drives and that sort of thing. They tend to increase in number, but I must reject entirely, categorically and dogmatically the suggestion of my hon. Friend that the figure that he draws from Government sources of 100,000 itinerants really has any relevance at all.

My hon. Friend spoke of 89 families in his area which had increased to 100. I would say that we are dealing with a large number of hundreds or a small number of thousands in the country as a whole. These are people who have a perfect right to live in the way they want to live, provided that they do not do anything to damage their neighbours or to offend against the criminal law, or to live in such an unhygienic or unsettled way as to damage the environment of their children. People, after all, have the right to live the sort of life that they want to live subject to this restraint on un-neighbourly behaviour.

Mr. Victor Goodhew (St. Albans)

Would not my right hon. Friend agree that there is another aspect which he has omitted in his summary, and that is the question of people earning an income in these cases obviously without paying any tax on it? Surely this is antisocial, to say the least.

Sir K. Joseph

We are dealing with people who are, by hypothesis, itinerant and, therefore, relatively hard to pin down in this way. My hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) has raised a fiscal issue which the mover of the Motion did not cover. I have no evidence that these people escape the tax net, though I suspect that my hon. Friend's assumption may have some truth in it.

However, it all comes down, as I shall seek to show, to the fact that these people shift rapidly from place to place, and much of the trouble of which my hon. Friends complain, including, in fact, the fiscal allegation just made, flow from this. What the House is interested in is what is being done and what should be done about it. I am going to comment on all the suggestions made by my hon. Friends, but I must state clearly what, in the Government's view, needs to be done.

These people need to be settled. They need to be offered the opportunity to lead a more stable, a more civilised and a static form of life, and the local authorities must be encouraged, as the Government have been encouraging them, to provide the necessary sites. I very well understand the reluctance of settled communities to accept that sites should be near them, and I know very well the passionate outcry that occurs when a local authority proposes to locate a site near a settled community. However, it really is not possible to tackle the problem if the attitude of the public is always going to be, "These people should be settled, but not near us".

My rather invidious job as the Minister responsible for land planning is to take into account, when the inevitable decisions come to me, all the factors involved, including public opinion, and to make the decision. I should like at this point to pay tribute to the patient work of my hon. Friend the Joint Parliament Secretary to my Department who has for the last nearly two years been working with the councils to try to secure an increasing number of sites. I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, South-West was very right in saying that if a particular county or district does offer a site then there is always the danger that on that site will descend scores, if not hundreds, of didicoi families drawn from all the way round, and this inhibits individual counties and districts from being cooperative. The only way out of the dilemma is that the Government should press all the councils involved to act simultaneously.

Our efforts at the moment are directed towards pressing the local authorities, the counties around London in particular, to set up as many sites as are needed at about the same time. The progress has not been unsatisfactory. There are now, or are about to be established, nine sites for itinerants around London and a large number more are in the pipeline. Most of these will involve a planning decision by myself, and, therefore, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his restraint about the particular proposal at Bushey that is going to inquiry next week and on whose merits, therefore, I cannot comment. There is now an acceleration by the counties involved to provide a sufficient number of sites, all of them provided at about the same time, thus avoiding the danger of a descent by these people on one county alone.

Many of these people will have to be cajoled into using the sites, because they are by nature people who have opted, for this form of life often because they are feckless by character or have for some reason, good or bad, become antisocial—people who by character do not like the idea of the stable life. But if we can provide a settled way of life for them and if we can settle them in stable communities, then all the evils of which my hon. Friend so justly complained will, I believe, be far less evident.

Let us go through some of the problems. We know that these people inhabit verges and common land and provide a disturbing, unhygienic, and, indeed, anti-social influence. We know that they pester housewives at the door. We know that they leave rubbish and litter about, and we know, whether it is a connected or quite distinct phenomenon, that we are having a rash of old car bodies and other junk left lying about the countryside. In so far as these things are the result of the didicoi, then the settling of them in communities with, it may be, some special welfare supervision—though this is not as yet a particular Government decision—should eliminate the anti-social and unhygienic effect which their present peripatetic way of life tends to produce.

My hon. Friend has made a number of individual suggestions with which I propose to deal. He urges that in so far as some of these people deal in scrap they should be registered, and he rightly points out that at the moment these powers are adoptive rather than mandatory. He said that the Scrap Metal Dealers Bill, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-West (Sir D. Kaberry), would provide powers for the registration of scrap merchants, but he has failed to recognise that registration of scrap merchants, either under existing legislation or under my hon. Friend's Bill, depends on the scrap merchant being a resident in the area concerned. The essence of the problem is that these people are not resident and they will not, therefore, be caught either by the present legislation or by my hon. Friend's Bill.

Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan

Surely it would be an encouragement to the didicoi to become resident, which is what we want.

Sir K. Joseph

I fear that my right hon. Friend is drawing the wrong conclusion. If they are people who wish to avoid the trammels of civilised life it will be a discouragement to them to settle if, by settling, they become subject to registration. Despite that, I think that our objective is the right one. Let us settle them by every means of persuasion that we can use. One of the results of settling them will be that they will become liable to registration, and the benefits which my hon. Friend foresees from registration will then flow.

The next subject to which my hon. Friend referred was that much more should be done about the disposal of bulky junk and in particular "dead" motor cars. I can tell the House that the draft circular which will contain the advice that I propose to give to local authorities will be going to the local authority associations and to the trade associations involved for their comments in the near future. I shall hope, therefore, that, before many months, the circular containing advice on motor car disposal will be officially issued.

Motor car disposal is obviously a growing problem. Local authorities already use quite a large number of light presses to dispose of parts of motor cars, but the massive presses needed to pulp, or to press into very small compass whole motor cars at a time, are not in use in this country, so far as I know, in any numbers at all. I must add that the one press of which I am aware can handle whole car bodies only after certain parts have been removed, such as the cylinder block, which do not respond to this sort of treatment. It may interest the House to know that one firm in the Principality of Wales has quite a thriving export trade in these presses of different sizes but, alas, at the moment, I believe, no home market.

It may well be that after the circular has been issued, local authorities will recognise that, either alone or in groups, they will have to go in for more elaborate machinery both for cars and for bulky junk. Local authorities will have to recognise that the continuing burden of the cost of disposing of heavy rubbish will be one which they will have to face in the future. In the case of less bulky junk the capital involved is not heavy, but the task is a continuing one and is an additional burden on local authorities.

The working party on refuse collection as a whole, of which car bodies and bulky junk are only two parts, will be in action this year and, I hope, will have its report ready some time about the turn of the year, although I cannot commit myself to a precise date. The short answer to my hon. Friend is that the draft circular on car disposal will be out fairly soon.

My hon. Friend went on to attack the present level of penalties. It is not just a question of the weight of the penalty. It is, above all, a question of getting the penalty paid. I must tell my hon. Friend that even where one of these characters is caught red-handed in the deposit of litter or junk, it still is a very different question to get him into court and to get him condemned, because magistrates do not always levy the whole fine. The £10 fine for dropping litter may not sound adequate to my hon. Friend, but it is not always exacted even when the offence is proved, and it is very difficult to get these wanderers, by summons, into a court.

All this would be much eased if we got them into stable communities. My hon. Friend, with a humanity which know is his, spoke of his preferred policy of settling these families in individual units in existing communities, rather than disrupting, as he put it, whole neighbourhoods by imposing upon those neighbourhoods a group of such families. I must tell him that there may well be a need, for the short-term, to isolate from existing stable communities the more unsettled of these families who comprise the majority of the people concerned. We might be able to persuade local authorities to pick out fairly balanced and stable groups of individual families and put them into existing communities. But these would be only a very small minority. The majority of these families need to be settled in small communities of their own for the moment, under possibly benevolent but firm guidance, in the hope that trey will then become much more stable and so able to enter normal community life.

There are some encouraging results. In my hon. Friend's own county the county council has provided a temporary camp, and all the children, I am glad to say, are now going to school. It may be through the love of the parents for their children and the concern of the parents to give their children a better opportunity than they had that we shall be able to persuade them to enter these camps. Insistence upon economic rents and any suggestion that we can control families—though how we can do so in a free society I do not understand—would discourage the didicoi from entering into communities. We have got to persuade them to enter. The acceptance of school life by those who have entered is an encouraging sign.

It may make a good sentence in a speech to say that no more of these people should be allowed into this country, but, really, we have to face the fact that this is a free society. This is not a police State, and I do not see how we could go about stopping people coming to this country by means that are legitimate, and then immediately, or later, becoming didicois. What we have to do is to make sure that a stable form of life is available to those who make the decision, for one reason or another, to be unsettled in a settled world.

I am sorry to tell my hon. Friend that I can give him no immediate panacea, but the number of sites provided is increasing. The Home Counties, in particular, seem now to have fully recognised the problem and have accepted that the current proposals are the right way to tackle the problem. From the stabilising of these people will follow the clearing up of the various problems of which my hon. Friend has understandably spoken with considerable heat.

There is a need for some sort of public awareness of the combined proposals that the Government have in mind. Perhaps the need, above all, is that we should know more about why people take to this form of life. We know that they are not Romanies. We know that they have adopted this way of life for various reasons, good or bad—in some cases fecklessness and in some cases revulsion against a settled life. It may be that by research we shall have to find out more about the origins of what are still a small but a growing number of problem families, and that is a course which the Government will be examining.

11.58 a.m.

Mr. James MacColl (Widnes)

I do not want to detain the House merely by talking for the sake of talking, but it would be wrong not to say, on behalf of the Opposition, a word of sympathy for those who have to tackle this extremely difficult problem.

My main constructive point I got from my hon. Friend the Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart) and it was mentioned by the hon. Member for Hertfordshire, South-West (Mr. Longden), namely, the meaning of the word "didicoi". I can only say that what little experience I have of this problem has been with the tinkers in the Highlands of Scotland, which is a very old problem. They are not Egyptians at all, and they create the same kind of difficulties, and have been doing this for many centuries, so far as can tell.

The only constructive suggestion that I can offer is that I am sure that in trying to assimilate people of different ways of life, one should start by not generalising too much about a whole group. Once we label people, whatever the label is, we tend to make it more difficult to get public opinion to accept them and more difficult to deal with those who can be settled.

The right hon. Gentleman rightly said that in some cases it would be easy to assimilate, and the right approach to this problem is to pick out people, to take them on their merits and try to get them settled, but it is obviously a gesture of charity by a local community to be prepared to make the effort to welcome these people and give them a stake in the community. If this is not done, the problem will continue.

I was interested to hear the right hon. Gentleman say that didicoi were performing an economic function. A didicoi woman would not pull wads of pound notes out of her skirt unless she were earning in a competitive society, or had been unusually fortunate in a visit to a bookmaker. They are performing a function and if there is a profit to be earned, that in itself, as I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will agree, is not inherently wrong. While they are performing an economic function that should be encouraged, and they should be encouraged to do it under reasonable conditions.

I quite agree that we have to be tough with them if they are breaking the law or being a nuisance to the community. But we have to leave the door open in the direction in which people can settle down and perform a useful social function. Certainly, they are not the only people to earn money without paying tax. If we were to condemn them for that we should have to condemn a very large section of the community.

I agree with almost everything the right hon. Gentleman said, but I have two qualifications to make. One is on the disposal of old motor cars. The other day I went around a very large machinery plant in my constituency. It is one of the largest in the country. What frightened me was the thought, on the lines of "everything that goes up must come down", that all that metal was pouring through the machinery hour after hour and coming out as new cars and that eventually it would all be got rid of as scrap.

This is a problem which will grow with tremendous momentum and we have to modernise our ideas about it. We are trying to face a mass production age with Victorian methods. The parties are competing about modernisation. Here is a field in which they might usefully compete in trying to bring these matters up to date. I am sure that we shall never get rid of the temptation to leave litter and the rather bogus methods of scrap dealing so long as people are faced with the overwhelmingly difficult problem of getting rid of old cars.

The other point I make is on the size of the penalty for leaving litter. It is pleasant to see the Joint Under-Secretary of State to the Home Office on the Government Front Bench. Perhaps it is a little unfair to take advantage of that fact, but I believe she is looking at the problem of modernising and bringing penalties up to date. I think that the Minister was wrong in saying that there is no need to look at this matter. It is not enough to say that the litter penalty of £10 is never enforced.

The point is that what Parliament fixes as a maximum penalty is taken as a maximum. Courts, naturally, consider that if Parliament suggests that £10 is the maximum for a very gross offence, perhaps for the second or third offence, moderate offences will be dealt with somewhere lower down the scale. It is very important that monetary penalties should be brought up-to-date. Otherwise, they will not be regarded seriously and as effective.

I say again how much I sympathise in this problem and realise the difficulties. We shall give every possible support to what individual hon. Members and the right hon. Gentleman and other Departments concerned are trying to do, but this is an intractable problem which only patience and charity can solve.